BY ROMMEL YNION
WE should have seen it coming but, apparently, our “institutional” memory has not been responsive to current events that we have somehow been caught flat-footed amid the onslaught of controversies whirling around Malacañang over the unconstitutionality of its Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP).
Simply put, DAP is illegal. Why? Because it is unconstitutional. Why? Because the Supreme Court said so (And because, c’mon, anything that is unconstitutional is illegal with the Constitution as the fundamental law from which all other laws emanate). Why? Because, as enshrined in our Constitution, only the Supreme Court has the power vested upon it by the majority of Filipinos to interpret the laws of our land. It is its raison d’être, its reason for being.
But, as far as President Benigno Aquino III – or simply abbreviated as “P-noy” by his friends and foes alike – is concerned, the Supreme Court ruling on his DAP was wrong. Why? Because he said so. Why? Because he is an Aquino and therefore, he is always right.
And why? Because, lest we forget, it was his mother, Cory who, along with her motley crew of freedom fighters, concocted the 1987 Constitution on which Supreme Court based its decision. Why? Because she ousted then President Ferdinand Marcos in the so-called People Power Revolution revered the world over as a political invention even effective in inducing the collapse of the Soviet Empire. But that’s another story.
Loud and clear. But again, why? Because, according to official Comelec ballots, Cory lost to Marcos – and since Cory didn’t like the Comelec results, she called on all Filipinos to rise against Marcos. And, later supported by the Church, the middle-class and the military, she led a bloodless coup against Malacañang which, as stated above, later became known as People Power Revolution.
And so, since Martial Law days, that has been the behavioral pattern of our body politic. Every time the opposition opposed the authorities, they “consulted” the people, feeling their pulse to figure out which side of the issue they were on in an attempt to woo them, entice them and, bottom-line, to win them over to their camp. No doubt those were the good old days.
This behavioral pattern (composed of habits, whether good or bad, only history can judge in the future) also came to the fore when, at the latter part of his term, then President Fidel Ramos moved to amend the 1987 Constitution.
True to form, Cory, seething with veiled anger against her anointed one, called on the people to mass at EDSA once again to demonstrate unequivocally her stand against any form of amendment to the 1987 Constitution conceived, drafted and ratified under her watch.
After witnessing how the multitude, seemingly at Cory’s beck and call, thronged at EDSA, the sea of faces expressing nothing but aversion to any form of revision in the 1987 Constitution, Ramos, his tail tucked between his legs, backtracked, tossing his carefully mapped-out political plans to the whirlwind, his misadventure nipped in the bud at its embryonic stage, relegated indefinitely on the back-burner of history.
We saw this behavioral pattern rearing its monstrous head again at the height of the jueteng scandal that engulfed President Erap Estrada. Reeling from wave after wave of scandals involving illegal gambling “payolas” exchanging hands in high places, Erap only needed to court the whirlwind to know what political tsunami meant.
Alas, Erap, his derring-do unmatched and even deathless, did not just court the whirlwind but – hold your breath – even inhaled it through his nostrils down onto his parched esophagus and into his deflated lungs ravaged by a lifetime of chain-smoking.
Ah, that unopened envelope haunting us again like a montage. For it was the proverbial straw that finally broke the camel’s back, inducing a tsunami that obliterated the Erap administration, its vestiges eventually eking out the mass uprising known as Edsa Tres. But that’s another story.
And so, as the Cory magic swept across the length and breadth of our benighted land for the past 28 years, it has meant the tragic end of the age-old Marcos rule, the collapse of a barely three-year-old Erap regime, and unending political turbulence all throughout nine years of President Gloria Arroyo’s stay in Malacañang.
The behavioral pattern, defining our body politic for almost 30 years, is unmistakable and can only be summed up as the delegation of political control to the mob and crowning it as ruling class of our society.
To put it bluntly, we exist not in a democracy but in a mobocracy, governed not by democratic ideals but mobocratic habits that have now pushed our republic to the brink of collapse, its institutions already splitting asunder.
Yes, we should have seen it coming last Monday: P-noy, hemmed in on one side by a Supreme Court bent on teaching him to uphold the fundamental law of the land, vented his frustrations before the mob, appealing to their emotion, titillating their ego in a manner that only befits the royals, addressing them as his “boss” instead of trivializing them as he usually does in lesser occasions, and extolling the virtues of DAP as if they held the only power that could negate the Supreme Court ruling on it.
P-noy, now flummoxed, torn between the devil and deep blue sea, can only turn to time-tested techniques in ramming his will down the throat of the citizenry; his reason now numbed by fatigue after wave after wave of controversies first over pork barrel funds, otherwise known as PDAF and now, his DAP, he can only rely on instinct comprised of old habits that die hard, one of which is the habitual knee-jerk reaction to embrace mobocracy in a time of constitutional crisis.
Intoxicated with the efficacy of people power and its glorious past, P-noy thinks the mob will come to his rescue once again; but unfortunately, times have changed, the cyberspace symbolizing the Information Age and unlimited access to information, the citizenry now aided by tools that keep them informed and immune from illogic.
P-noy is wrong, unmistakably wrong./PN
